Now China has fake graft busters

A gang in northeastern China posing as anti-corruption prosecutors built a fake interrogation center with a government seal on the wall and kidnapped a local official and his wife to extort money.

Police arrested three people in the case and are looking for a fourth, Reuters said.

The suspects in Heilongjiang province kidnapped an agricultural official and his wife from their home.

The official, Zhang Wei, and his wife were told they were being arrested and had hoods placed over their heads. They were driven to a building made to look like an interrogation center, including a government seal on the wall, the report said.

“Two of them started to question me and came up with several issues of breaking the law. I said these issues simply didn’t exist, and when after a few hours they’d not got any answers, they started to get nervous,” Zhang said.

Zhang eventually negotiated his release by agreeing to pay about $63,000. When he and his wife were freed to retrieve the money, Zhang called the police.

Police said the gang spent about $30,000 constructing the fake interrogation center during a three-month build out.

_______

Richard L. Cassin is the publisher and editor of the FCPA Blog. He can be contacted here.

Founder of the FCPA Blog and Editor at Large. He has been named multiple times as one of the 100 Most Influential People In Business Ethics by Ethisphere Magazine and is a Trust Across America Top Thought Leader. He’s a member of the DC, Virginia, and Florida bars. His At Large column is a regular feature of the FCPA Blog.

Legal

Quick Links

About

We set out in 2007 to bring our readers free and unrestricted coverage of all Foreign Corrupt Practices Act enforcement actions — the first to do that in real-time.

Since then we’ve published more than 7,500 posts by 600 different authors.

Our mission is to help compliance professionals and others everywhere understand how corruption happens, what it does to people and institutions, and how anti-corruption laws and compliance programs work.